“You’re in the wrong house,” she said clearly, as she inched her way along the desk. Her camera tripods were in the corner. Short of heaving the computer monitor at him, they were the heaviest objects in the room. Maybe she could hit him with one and bolt through the doorway.

Maybe he’d shoot her before she lifted a finger.

“Are you drunk? Lost?” She prayed her desperation didn’t sound in her voice. Rivers of fear snaked down her spine to pool at the base. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Shrouded in shadows, he appeared only half-human. “You’ll have to leave. You don’t belong here.”

“Now that’s real funny.” His humorless words could have been chipped from ice. “That’s exactly what I was going to say to you.”

He flipped the switch and the room was flooded with light. Her concentration abruptly splintered. The music pouring through her headphones had masked his entrance, so he’d gotten her attention the only way he could. On the heels of that realization came another: the light did little to allay her fear.

He was dressed in jeans, a snug navy T-shirt, boots and an attitude. His eyes were very nearly as black as his hair. Penetrating. Merciless. His expression was as unyielding as the sandstone bluffs that dotted the desert.

She’d been to more of the world’s trouble spots than she liked to recall. Had photographed wild-eyed fanatics, zealots willing to die for a cause, power-hungry warlords. None of those men had scared her as much as the one standing in front of her. She’d known what motivated them, and the lengths they’d go to get it.

It was impossible to tell what this man was capable of.

Recognition of that fact had her moving again. Gracelessly she stumbled toward the corner, grasped the sturdiest of the tripods and hefted it threateningly. “Get out.” Panic morphed abruptly to anger. She’d spent too much time in the last two years being afraid. And she wasn’t going to give him that kind of control over her. “Unless you want to be nursing a smashed skull, get the hell out of here. Now.”